Abstract
How it all began
In many ways, the Special Issue that you are about to read is the outcome of an experiment pursued under extraordinary circumstances. This introduction explains how our story began, evolved, and resulted in this Special Issue. To be clear, this introduction is not intended to be a self-congratulatory account of how well we achieved what we set out to achieve or how collaboratively we worked as a group. While we feel that the entire process of collaboration has been interesting and rewarding, there is no doubt that it has had its fair share of setbacks and tensions, and not all of us are perfectly happy with the outcome. The purpose of this introduction is to document how we approached this Special Issue as well as the challenges, joys, and surprises we encountered along the way. It is hoped that this document will help us achieve epistemic accountability, that is, to provide an honest account of the very process of our collective knowledge work, which we believe has had a significant bearing on what we, both individually and collectively, ultimately produced.
This is how our story began. ECNU Review of Education approached one of us (Keita) with the idea of putting together a Special Issue. I (Keita) was one of the participants in a three-day workshop held at East China Normal University (ECNU) in June 2019, led by Iveta Silova, Jeremy Rappleye, and Yun You. Commissioned by the journal, they invited several international scholars, including me, to the workshop where our initial responses to their call for a Special Issue were shared and discussed, and they were subsequently published in this journal (see Silova et al., 2020). Through this experience, Keita became familiar with the journal's editorial team and had an initial conversation regarding the possibility of a Special Issue in the near future.
Within a few months after returning from Shanghai, I (Keita) proposed to the journal's editorial team a theme for the Special Issue, at the time tentatively titled “Original” Theorizing From East Asian Education: Possibilities, Challenges and Contradictions. This was the title of the talk I gave at ECNU during my short stay. The topic reflected my recent critique of the global politics of academic knowledge production and circulation in education and the need to reposition East Asia as an epistemic, as opposed to empirical, Other (Takayama, 2016; Takayama et al., 2017). While the call drew inspiration from postcolonial/decolonial scholarship, including Alatas (2006), Connell (2007), and Mignolo (2011), it positioned as its central intellectual resource, Chen's (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization and his call for a regionally focused inter-textual mode of analysis in Asia. My initial plan was to replicate what Silova et al. (2020) had done in Shanghai—to hold a several-day workshop at ECNU in mid-2020, to which all of the handpicked participants were to be invited to work with me to create a Special Issue.
Unfortunately—or rather fortunately in hindsight—the idea of organizing an in-person workshop in Shanghai was quickly discarded when the pandemic spread rapidly in early 2020, and I (Keita) had to quickly develop an alternative plan. Then, joined by Yoonmi Lee of Hongik University, Korea, we decided to send out an open call for expression of interest and organize a series of online meetings to work with whoever was keen to join us. With Yoonmi's input, the initial call was revised, expanded, and retitled as Educational Theorizing in/for/From East Asia: Possibilities and Contradictions Towards a Regional Dialogue. Here is the first paragraph of the open call. This is a call for papers—perhaps of an unusual kind—the theme of which is left deliberately vague. All we know at this point is that we are interested in gathering like-minded education researchers interested in East Asia and collectively exploring what it means to research education in/for/from East Asia today. The theme of the Special Issue is left vague because we believe that it is not something that can be decided on before we meet and learn from each other. In this sense, we place relationship first as the very condition for the knowledge we collectively produce. The path to the publication of the Special Issue can be meandering and thus frustrating at times, particularly for those who are keen to produce something quickly. However, it is precisely this kind of “fast scholarship” that we wish to counter in our initiative. The focus is not just on the outcome (the Special Issue) but also on how we get there, that is, the process of knowledge sharing and generation. The theme for the Special Issue is expected to crystalize as we meet and engage with each other for the next several months. If you are interested in the theme and the “slow scholarship” approach we are taking, you are welcome to join us.
The call stressed the idea of slow scholarship, a deliberate attempt to defy an instrumentalist approach to knowledge work in which productivity and speed are prioritized over meaningfulness and relationships. We hoped that the group would provide a space for genuine sharing, risk-taking, and mutual support so that the relationships formed would be long-lasting, potentially evolving into something else after our collaboration on the Special Issue ended.
However, apart from the overall theme of East Asian dialogue and slow scholarship, we did not have a clear plan, nor did we have a specific timeframe for the project. All we knew was that we were going to create this Special Issue under the extraordinary circumstances of the global pandemic. We thought we might as well try something different for the Special Issue, perhaps something more meaningful, when the global health crisis was ripping apart our sense of social connection and trust. The experience of an extended period of home isolation and remote work certainly forced us to reflect on the meaning of our intellectual work and the pace at which we were encouraged to publish to stay “research-active.”
Having said this, we do not mean to suggest that we were fully cognizant of the global situation and consciously positioning the Special Issue against it in a thoughtful and reflexive manner at that time. Describing our work in this way would be an act of retrospective rationalization, in which past events are presented as if they were rationally planned and executed to achieve well-thought-out goals. It is more accurate and honest to state, to put it in our casual parlance, that “it just happened that way.” However, the global pandemic, which caused us to experience a serious existential crisis at the time, might have intensified our desire for meaning and connection in what we were about to embark upon and how we were going to carry it out.
To our surprise, we received numerous responses to the call for expression of interest, particularly from graduate students and academics based in East Asia or studying East Asian education. Most were East Asian scholars located in different parts of the world, both in and outside East Asia. We held our first online meeting on March 22, 2020, where we introduced each other, discussed the theme of the Special Issue, and decided on the approach we were going to take from that point onward. It turned out that many of the participants wanted to join because of the slow scholarship approach indicated in the call for expression of interest. For example, one of the group members, Nutsa joined us because I was attracted to the originality of “slow scholarship,” a rare approach to challenge the culture of speed in our universities. I see great value in sharing “raw” ideas, receiving peer-feedback, and providing reflection for an extended period of time. (Nutsa)
East Asia
From the beginning of our collective work, we have known that our focus on East Asia can be a double-edged sword. Both Yoonmi and Keita wrote extensively on the paradoxes associated with the use of Asia and East Asia in educational research, criticizing scholars who deployed this geographical/cultural/geopolitical/racial concept in an uncritical and unthoughtful way (Lee, 2019; Takayama, 2016). Indeed, our original call for expression of interest clearly conveyed our ambivalence with the use of the term East Asia as the central focus of the Special Issue: However, East Asia is a complicated term that requires considerable sensibility and nuance. Immediately, many questions pop up in our mind; what countries and populations are included in East Asia? Who decides on its membership, and whose interests does it serve? What social relations and geopolitical arrangements and imaginations does it normalize, and what blind spots does it create? On what basis can East Asia be said to possess unity and coherence? Is it possible at all? The truth is that we don’t have the definite answers to these questions. but we think that exploring them in the field of educational research is worthwhile and timely.
At the first online meeting, Keita gave a presentation titled Why Is It Significant Now to Research Education in/for/from East Asia? Keita highlighted the unprecedented international attention given to East Asian education, partly due to East Asian countries/cities’ outstanding performance on OECD's PISA. He then critiqued the scholarly representation of East Asian education and how East Asia has been positioned in the global division of intellectual labor: East Asia as an empirical, as opposed to epistemic, Other. He raised the following set of questions to initiate the group dialogue:
Is East Asia a meaningful category at all? What has East Asian education meant for international education researchers? What are the new ways in which East Asian education can be researched? What new knowledge-producing relationships can we aim for in East Asia and beyond? What do your research findings mean regionally? What new regional relationships are generated in your research? Whose theories are used to analyze your East Asian data? How does your research help subvert or disrupt the international intellectual division of labor and stereotypes regarding East Asian education? How does your research help us provincialize/peculiarize the “universal” premises of theories and practices (“best practice”)? How does your research help us rethink what East Asia means in education?
After some discussion, Keita briefly introduced several key points drawn from Chen's (2010) Asia as Method and further problematized the notion of East Asia, the very geographical, cultural, racial, and geopolitical construct used to bring the participants together. He proposed the notion of East Asia as a relational and inherently fluid construct, the colonial legacy of which must always be problematized. It is a concept deeply mired in the colonial binary between the universal (the West) and the particular (Asia), and its use can only be justified with a high degree of reflexivity; we must ask under what circumstances and toward what end we mobilize this geographical/cultural/racial/geopolitical construct. The purpose of the presentation was to cement the idea that our collective project would have to be deeply contradictory and even paradoxical; it would require a simultaneous process of deconstruction and reconstruction (see Lee, 2019). The last slide of Keita's presentation posed the following questions for members to consider when preparing their draft manuscripts:
The first online meeting was followed by monthly meetings in which each member shared their tentative writing ideas and responses to the questions posed by Keita.
Weakness, risk, and outsiders
Through a series of online meetings and workshops, it became clear that as a group, we were making the process of producing a Special Issue as “risky” as possible, in the sense that we defied any impulse for immediate certainty, knowability, and predictability (Biesta, 2013). When editing a Special Issue or putting together an edited book, it has become customary for editors to propose a well-developed focus for the Special Issue (or edited book) and handpick likeminded scholars to contribute. Here, the process of editing a Special Issue is controlled because a shared understanding of a given topic is a condition of participation and cooperation. Either invited contributors are already known to have developed a research track record in an area that is aligned with the proposed theme, or they are trusted to be able to produce quality scholarship. Hence, the process is presumed to be closed, linear, and relatively predictable. The interactions between the editors and contributors as well as among the contributors are kept to a minimum, and there is limited room for the co-construction of knowledge in the process. A relationship is formed, but it is temporary and instrumental, never expected to bear any significance on what results as the final “product.”
To borrow the language of educational philosopher Gert Biesta (2013), we were interested in keeping the process of editing our Special Issue as “weak” as possible. What if we attempted to explore the generative and creative potential of the process itself by leaving it “radically open and undetermined—and hence weak and risky” (Biesta, 2013, p. 26)? What if we embraced Dewey's pragmatist notion of communication and the idea that “common understanding is produced by, is the outcome of successful cooperation in action” (Biesta, 2013, p. 30)? To translate this idea into the specific context of producing a Special Issue, what if we take seriously the idea that the process of working toward a Special Issue is a constitutive part of what we end up producing as a group? Needless to say, this alternative approach requires us to refuse the urge to be efficient and instrumental, to stop treating our internal group relations as a means to an end so that we feel free not only to experiment and take risks in our respective intellectual endeavors but, more importantly, to embrace, listen to, and learn from the “outsiders” among us, that is, those who could confront us with a set of assumptions and ideas that seem unfamiliar, strange, or even unsettling to us in the first place.
Here, we draw upon education philosopher Satoji Yano's (2020) work on the pedagogical implications of “outsiders.” Drawing on Socrates, Bataille, and Nietzsche, among others, Yano traces an alternative genealogy of pedagogy that he distinguishes from its widely accepted conception as a form of community socialization/initiation. Yano problematizes the conventional view, wherein teachers assist children to become legitimate members of a given community, or what Biesta (2013) would call “socialization.” Here, as Yano (2020) maintains, the potential of education is limited to “initiation,” or the reproduction of what already exists in the community. To articulate an alternative notion of pedagogy, Yano (2020) stresses the critical role of “outsiders,” defined as those who have left the community to experience “the world out there” and then return to the community with a set of new assumptions that are markedly different from those shared within the secular community. Their presence within the community destabilizes the secular norms and conventions sanctified within the community, allowing in-group members to recognize the limits of their own knowing. What makes “outsiders” pedagogically powerful is their disruptive potential that can transform those inside, enabling them to reject their habitual ways of knowing and being, or the “doxa” within the community (see also Biesta, 2013).
Yano (2020) takes the philosophical discussion of “outsiders” to articulate the potentials of education as an entry point into “another world” in which humans are pushed to renounce their modern, rationalist, and instrumentalist view of and relationship with the world to achieve what he calls the “de-humanization” of humans. In his view, education for human “development” has dominated the postwar education discourse in Japan, where learning is conceptualized exclusively in terms of its instrumental logics wherein the present moments are subordinated to what one is expected to perform in the future. In Yano's mind, children in postwar Japan have become “too human,” that is, fully socialized into the modern sensibilities in which the world is already classified, ordered, and then stabilized and where children learn to draw a boundary between the self and the world. What is lost in the process is the experience of self-dissolution (自己溶解) or self-overcoming (脱自), which allows for one's radical opening toward and deep intimacy with the world. As an alternative, Yano proposes what he calls education for life (生成の教育), in which children “unlearn being humans” so that they can begin to engage with the world differently This is a mode of learning in which children learn the limits of what humans are capable of and what exists beyond human cognition. It is the type of education for which the presence of “outsiders” is critical: Children are invited to explore “another world” where the modern, rational, and cognitive mind serves little use.
Yano's radical call for de-humanization of humans is clearly beyond the scope of what we thought we could achieve through our collective work. Nonetheless, Yano's discussion partly relates to what we were trying to achieve and how. First, it relates to our expressed desire to reject modernist instrumentalism and linearity as epitomized in the notion of “fast” scholarship. Second, we were fully cognizant of the pedagogical potential of “outsiders” for our collective group work. This was evident from the fact that we intentionally created disciplinary and methodological diversities among us, approaching two individuals known for their strong quantitative sociological backgrounds (Hirofumi was one of them), two known for philosophical expertise (Duck-Joo was one of them), Min for her curriculum studies background, and Lin for his historical scholarship. Furthermore, we were prepared to work with whoever was interested in joining us (Lisa, Nutsa, Yanping, Linfeng, and Yiyang). When we finally formed a group to commence the first online meeting, we were strangers to each other, as the majority of us did not know of each other's scholarship. It was a group formed on the basis of mutual strangeness, yet bound by a shared interest in questions regarding what East Asia means in/for education research. Third, we hoped that encounters with strangers (or outsiders) would push us to open ourselves up and let go of the self (self-overcoming) so that we could collectively achieve a strong sense of “intimacy” or the interdependent sense of selfhood for which East Asian culture is arguably known (Hamaguchi, 1985; Kasulis, 2002).
Here, we recognize an interesting synergy between Yano's discussion on self-overcoming and self-dissolution on the one hand and the Japanese and East Asian comparative philosopher Kasulis’s (2002) notion of “intimacy” on the other. Proposing a notion of intimacy beyond the typical meaning of sexual intimacy, Kasulis (2002) explains the ontological assumptions of self and relationality that underlie an intimacy-oriented culture (e.g., East Asia). According to Kasulis (2002), self–others relationality in an intimacy culture is internal, meaning that it is more than a connection between two discrete entities. In an internal relationship of intimacy culture, the two entities overlap, with relationality reconstituting what or who they are. Here, others are recognized as “part of what I am or have become” (Kasulis, 2002, p. 37). An internal relationship is contrasted with an external relationship, in which two entities form a relationship, yet both maintain their respective identity or integrity (e.g., a contractual relationship). Kasulis (2002) argues that intimacy, or internal relations, characterizes the cultural orientation of East Asia under strong Buddhist influence and that integrity, or external relations, characterizes the cultural orientation of Western modernity.
The ontological implication of intimacy, as expounded on by Kasulis (2002), helped us make better sense of the process of our collective work. According to Kasulis (2002), relationships become internal or intimate when both parties are prepared to incorporate and be incorporated by each other. In this trans-individual relationality, we let go of our sense of self as “pure and untouched” and “surrender part of us” to “become part of the relational whole” (p. 54). He further argues that this process requires intimacy be “an end in itself, not a means to satisfying an ulterior motive” (p. 44). Reassessed through Kasulis's insights, it now seems sensible to consider that after spending nearly three years working as a group and commenting extensively on multiple versions of each other's papers, we have developed a strong sense of intimacy. Our individual intellectual projects have been incorporated and absorbed into each other so that we can see each other's inputs everywhere in our writing, including in this introductory article. Given that being interdependent is one of the key ontological orientations foregrounded in East Asia (Hamaguchi, 1985; Kasulis, 2002), one could argue that we were perhaps learning and exploring being East Asian to achieve a shared, regional subjectivity through extensive mutual engagements over the past few years.
However, while learning to work as a group in an “East Asian way” is one thing, coming to terms with the methodological significance of East Asia in education research is another, that is, the former does not automatically translate into the latter. When joining the group, very few of us had given any serious consideration to the idea of East Asia and its implications for our research. Apart from a few, most of us had little to no experience of looking at our educational concerns from the distinct regional perspective. We had long studied, for example, Chinese education, yet the point of reference for the study was China alone, implicitly in relation to what was putatively Western, or a bit of both. In other words, all of us were conscious enough of the relevance of East Asia for our identity or our research to be attracted to the focus of the Special Issue, yet we had little idea how to translate our implicit regional consciousness into a research project with a distinct regional framework.
Our meandering
In an online meeting held in May 2021, Keita and Yoonmi proposed that all of us prepare a short reflection on the ongoing process of our discussion. By that time, we had met online several times and had developed a better sense of who we were. The group discussions were going well, and everyone seemed committed to the collective project. While a good sense of collegiality developed through our monthly meetings, there was also a sense that many of us were struggling to position our research in relation to the broader focus of Asia as Method. There is no doubt that Chen's call does require us to pursue a task that can be described as “a bit daunting” (Lisa) or “one of the most challenging intellectual adventures I have ever taken” (Lin). This is because Doing Asia as Method demands that we unlearn and relearn how to conduct research on East Asia. It also demands that we reposition our research projects in relation to the broader division of intellectual labor. This makes it incumbent upon us to demonstrate strong reflexivity toward East Asia as both an empirical and an epistemic object (Takayama, 2016). Having had all of us present our initial drafts for the Special Issue, Yoonmi and I knew that some of us would have to shift substantially to engage fully with Chen's work and thus predicted that some of us might be overwhelmed by the task ahead. We thought that it would be a good idea to document our challenges and share our short reflective writings to support each other. We also thought that the reflective pieces could potentially be incorporated into a Special Issue introduction in which the process of our collective work would be detailed.
For many of us who were trained in the Global North (U.K. and U.S. institutions), engaging with Chen's Asia as Method forced us to reflect on our biographical histories, including how we learned to become academics and how the process positioned us in a particular epistemic relationship with East Asia. Writing a short reflection on the challenges we encountered, hence, took some of us back to where we were born, raised, and schooled and how our subsequent life journey moved us away from where “home” was. For example, Min, a Chinese academic working in the USA, stated the following in her reflective notes: I grew up and received most of my education in China; her culture, language, and historical and contemporary struggles exist in my mind and heart. I came to the US to receive my graduate education and scholarly training and now work in US academia. (Min)
For Min, engaging with Asia as Method was a way to push herself further in the line of scholarship that she had been pursuing over the years. My early work on migrant children's education and community mobilization did not directly engage with the Asia as Method framework; however, I have been conscious about the politics of knowledge production and subjectivity. In the process of researching and writing about the work and lives of parents, teachers, and children in migrant communities for journal articles, book chapters, and a book and presenting my ongoing analyses at various academic conferences, I began to read about reflexivity, the politics of researchers’ identities in different contexts, and the “enactment of hybridity” of the ethnographer researching her “native” cultural group. (Min)
Yun You, a comparative education researcher trained in the U.K. and currently working at ECNU, participated in our group discussions as an ECNU observer. She stated that she had always been uneasy with the representation of East Asia in the English language scholarship of education. Though she had been trying to “destruct” such problematic representations, she remained unsure of how she could better understand and represent East Asia. My academic journey started from elaborating and destroying the Western representation and referencing of East Asian education. This soon led me to another interest: While challenging the power structure of being represented and instrumentally referenced, how should we understand and represent ourselves? (Yun)
Lisa, a Chinese-American scholar based in the U.S., joined us slightly later after she heard of our group from others. Once again, the exploration of Asia as Method led her to critically reflect on her own biography (U.S.-raised Chinese-heritage child). (…) I’m excited about critically engaging with the usefulness of existing regional frameworks (e.g., Confucianism, the ontological reality of “interdependent sense of self”). These frameworks are typically used without any problematization or consideration of variation across different East Asian contexts over space and time. I do feel it's a bit daunting to undertake this challenge for my piece but recognize that the significance of this Special Issue, and my piece is to take the (collective) first step in this longer journey. To do so, I believe the first step is recognizing the experiences and perspectives that I do carry, as a US-raised Chinese-heritage child, in understanding the topic of interest and, more generally, in the Special Issue. (Lisa)
The question of how to represent East Asia was complicated by the fact that the group included both those who were trained in the “Global North” and those who were trained in East Asia. Yiyang was a Chinese graduate student completing a PhD in Hong Kong SAR and was the only graduate student who participated in this group. For him, rethinking the notion of East Asia was quite new, as it had always been self-evident. In his words, “Before attending the first meeting in March, I held a simple idea that East Asia, as a geographical term, merely signifies an area.” This is understandable because as observed in Zhou et al.'s (2005) study on Chinese graduate students studying at Canadian universities, “they had rarely noticed ‘what is indigenous/Chinese knowledge’ or thought of defining ‘indigenous/Chinese knowledge’ when they were in China, because ‘everything there is a Chinese thing’” (p. 298). Similarly, Yiyang did not have to think about the significance of East Asia (China), nor its distinctiveness, when studying in East Asia (China). He then documented how his views shifted over time after being part of the group. However, Keita's introduction and the presentations and discussions in the following meetings inspired me to consider my original views carefully. Beyond the peculiarity of East Asian cultural soil and the contrast between the East and the West, I realize that there are many other possible ways of observing and interpreting education research in East Asia, like the dynamic interactions regionally and globally. Thus, besides the cultural dimension of tradition–modernity and the division of West–East, I will try to view “East Asia” as a process of self-growth (instead of modern transformation) amid the interaction between the East and the West in my research. (Yiyang)
To Lin, another Chinese scholar and historian of education who was trained in Hong Kong SAR and is now based in Shanghai, the workshop was a considerable intellectual challenge. Frankly, my decision to join this project turned out to be one of the most challenging intellectual adventures I have ever taken. During the past several months, I repeatedly adjusted the framework of my proposal to fit the theme of this Special Issue, and it seems I still need to do more in fulfilling this. I used to broadly define my major academic interest as “history of education in pre-modern East Asia.” This time, when I seriously thought about what East Asia/East Asian education stood for, I became very confused, and this further intensified my concerns about the outcome and possible contributions to/of this Special Issue. (Lin)
In the subsequent portion of the reflection, Lin further elaborates on his ambivalence toward the entire project, which was only hinted at in the above quote. Moreover, a deeper concern lies in the fundamental dilemma of such academic exploration, which I did not properly address in my previous studies. That is, to overlook the “Western standpoints/discourses/theories” will lead to the unacceptable “academic ignorance,” while the ambition of dialoguing with/criticizing/transcending them may signify their non-negligible existence and further strengthen Western influence. In this scenario, the following three basic points need to be constantly revisited throughout this project: 1) What does “East Asia” mean in this project? 2) What grants the proposition of beyond Western horizons a natural reasonability if we go further beyond our “common identity” of coming from/working in/studying of/ speaking for “East Asia”? 3) Will the claims and efforts targeting to go “beyond Western horizons” feed a newer and more predominant “West influence”? (Lin)
Interestingly, the group was not monolithic in terms of our sense of anxiety about representing East Asia. Hirofumi Taki is a Japanese quantitative sociologist of education who undertook all of his graduate training in Japan. Unfortunately, he ended up dropping out of the project in the last minute, but his reflection is worth noting in that it shows that, unlike many of us, he was very clear about the task ahead. As a reflection, I feel that it is useful to focus on the role of deduction and induction. Deduction is a process of reasoning that starts with a general truth and then applies that truth to a specific case, which means that we apply Western theories to our reality. Induction is a process of reasoning that infers a general conclusion based on individual cases, which means that we derive theories based on our reality. If we intend to confront the reality that cannot be properly explained by Western theories, then we should at least explain our reality according to a inductive process. In the Special Issue, I feel that what we can do is to show (1) how we cannot explain our reality using Western theories, (2) how we can make a particular phenomenon in a particular society “understandable” to a Western audience based on our observation, and (3) how we can actively discuss the framework of “Asia” rather than simply talking about deconstruction or the danger of Orientalism in general. (Hirofumi)
Nutsa, the only non-East Asian scholar (Georgian) in the group, who studies private tutoring in Hong Kong SAR, joined us because she was interested in “challenging [herself] to think differently about doing research in East Asia, which is not [her] native region but has become home for almost 10 years now.” While she openly discussed “[her] own limitation of being an outsider to East Asia ([she] noticed that [she is] the only non-Asian in the team so far),” she also saw what she could offer to the group: “I ask questions which some insiders take for granted.” In this sense, she was the much needed “outsider” for all of us who had little trouble identifying ourselves with “East Asians.” However, Nutsa was not entirely an outsider, either. As someone from another peripheral part of the world (Eastern Europe, specifically Georgia), she relates to the problem of epistemic marginalization raised by Chen's Asia as Method: Keita has been reminding us to use non-Western conceptual lenses, to decenter the West, and to be grounded in local knowledge. To a certain extent, this has been a problem with my country/region, and I am familiar with issues arising in scholarship that uses only Western ideologies without contextualization. (Nutsa)
She then goes on to argue the following: My engagement with previous research experience has brought me to an understanding that the most relevant conceptual understandings are actually coming from the data analysis and interpretation rather than a promise that one would use Western or non-Western theories; either one or both of them might be relevant to make sense of data. (Nutsa)
After much meandering over the course of several online meetings held from March 2020 to June 2021, Keita and Yoonmi proposed focusing on two concrete approaches that could guide our writing on East Asian education. The first approach was to position our work in relation to relevant research conducted in other parts of East Asia. It became clear that many of us had a very limited understanding of how other East Asian scholars had studied topics relevant to our research. Lurking behind this was the prevalent practice of “West as method” among us, in which each of us position our empirical studies of East Asia in relation to broader international (Western) scholarship. To move away from this problematic knowledge practice, the first approach invited the participants to engage in inter-referencing work in East Asia, as proposed by Chen (2010), and begin to shift the point of reference toward East Asia. We thought that this task might be comparatively easier than the second strategy, which will be discussed shortly, given that the source of the theoretical and conceptual tools used in our studies remains “Western” at this stage. We consider this task to be the first essential move, eventually leading to the second task.
The second approach we proposed was to work toward establishing East Asia as the basis for the conceptual framing of our educational research. This requires identifying common historical, cultural, and geopolitical experiences among East Asian countries and their manifestations in educational practices, thoughts, and institutions. To this end, Keita and Yoonmi suggested that we draw on the existing scholarship related to Confucius heritage culture (Tan, 2020), intimacy cultural orientation (Kasulis, 2002), compressed modernity and massification of schooling (Sato, 2011), the standardized education systems (Park, 2013), the role of private sectors in the expansion of secondary education (Aizawa et al., 2019), the East Asian developmentalist state human resource model which was disseminated from Japan, or what Cummings (1997) calls the J-model, and onto-pedagogy for interdependence (Komatsu & Rappleye, 2017), all of which speak to the regionally shared historical, cultural, political-economic, institutional, and pedagogical features. They can be used to constitute part of the research framework within which a given East Asian country's educational thoughts and practices can be (re)examined. We proposed these two approaches as two opposing poles on a continuum onto which our respective research could be mapped, although we left it up to each contributor to decide how much they wished to take up either of these approaches in their respective scholarship.
At the end of the online meeting in June 2021, we decided to take a break for the following two months and return with a 2,000–2,500-word draft by August 23. Thereafter, we held several more online meetings in late 2021, during which we shared each other's drafts and agreed to return for full-paper draft workshops starting from May 2022 onward. From May to July 2022, we organized five meetings where two to three papers were workshopped on Mondays 11:00 am–12:30 pm (Keita's Japan Standard Time). We then organized additional rounds of manuscript workshops in October and November 2022 and May and June 2023 for those who were interested in receiving more feedback from the group. All manuscripts were submitted for external review by June 2023.
Introducing the contributing papers
In “Teaching as Learning: Etymological Investigation, Canonical Analysis, and Experiential Reflection in the Chinese Cultural Context,” Lin Li (2024), an educational historian of classic Chinese texts based at ECNU, adds a distinctive flavor to our discussion of Asia as Method by situating it within his etymological approach to teaching and learning. Initially, Lin appeared hesitant to embrace Chen's idea of Asia as Method. Through a series of subsequent conversations, it became clear that this reluctance derived from his scholarly inclination to immerse himself deeply in Asia itself rather than distance himself from Asia and employ it as a methodological tool. To put it differently, as seen from where he was located, the notion of Asia as Method presupposes a particular positionality from where one can comfortably form an external, as opposed to an internal, relationship with Asia (Kasulis, 2002). Thus, Lin's hesitation immediately raises important questions for us to consider: Who is positioned to achieve affective and cognitive distance from Asia and hence objectify it for counter epistemic ends? Who, with what experiences and identities, is afforded such a “detached” positionality vis-à-vis Asia? Lin's struggle exposed the unintended exclusiveness of our collective project that was meant to bring us together.
After agonizing reflection, part of which was revealed in his comment quoted earlier, Lin opted to stick to the approach that he was most comfortable with, that is, to immerse himself in Chinese classic texts and base his insight on his own experiences rooted in China and informed by his deep understanding of the Chinese intellectual tradition. By canvassing both classic texts and his personal educational journey, Li investigates the intricate relationship between the act of teaching and that of learning from a Chinese literary standpoint. In contrast to the transactional buyer–seller, hence external, relationship found in Western pedagogical discourse, Lin argues that East Asian Confucian teachings encapsulate the heart of self-learning where teaching and learning forms internal relationship. He effectively uses a partly self-reflective style of writing to illustrate the notion of “teaching as learning,” which was brought to the fore through a meticulous etymological investigation of Chinese characters.
In “The Educator Standing on Chinese Cultural Ground: A Case Study of Chinese Basic Education Pedagogical Research,” Yiyang Zhong (2024), a PhD student at the University of Hong Kong, begins by introducing the rich tradition of pedagogical studies practiced among Chinese educators since the late 1970s. As he describes, many teachers undertook pedagogical studies to experiment with new pedagogical practices or solidify their theory–practice alignment, and some of their practices and reflections have been widely read by educators and studied by educational researchers. From the expansive network of such educators emerged nationally recognized Educators, including Jilin Li, the focus of Yiyang's chapter. Yiyang uses the term Educator (emphasized with a capital E) to denote their unique position within the Chinese educational community. Not only are they nationally acknowledged for their pedagogical excellence, but many of them, including Jilin Li, are also known to be the heirs of the Chinese intellectual/pedagogical traditions, drawing their insight from historical masters. It is this aspect of Li that attracted Yiyang to her; his investigation is driven by the concern that the profound and continuing influence of traditional values on educators has not been fully acknowledged in China because of the rush to embrace modern (Western) pedagogical traditions. Yiyang shows us how Li seamlessly integrated Chinese and foreign pedagogical traditions to probe her own subjectivity while still grounding her practice and reflection in the traditions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. As in the case of Lin's earlier paper, Yiyang squarely locates his study within the Chinese intellectual tradition with which he was familiar. Again, it is a form of refusal to achieve analytical distance from East Asia, or the rejection of instrumentalism implicit in Asia as Method.
While Lin and Yiyang both attempted to reclaim the cultural and intellectual tradition of Chinese pedagogy, Nutsa Kobakhidze and her team (2024), also based at the University of Hong Kong, invite us to consider for a moment the almost exclusive emphasis on culture and tradition in Lin's and Yiyang's articulation of Asia as Method. In “Tiger Parenting Beyond Cultural Essentialism: Discourses of Class, Culture, and Competition in Hong Kong,” they problematize the cultural essentialism associated with the popularized concept of “tiger parenting.” Their research is motivated by the desire to problematize the notion that tiger parenting is a traditionally rooted practice in Asia, a view widely accepted in many Anglo-American societies (Takayama, 2017). Their paper, based on interviews with diverse parent groups in Hong Kong SAR, demonstrates that although tiger parenting, often synonymous with intense competition, may evoke images of Asia, it was ubiquitously practiced across different ethnic communities in Hong Kong SAR. By highlighting its ties to middle class values and exploring the factors that influence both the hidden (latent) and overt (manifest) aspects of tiger parenting, they effectively challenge deep-seated stereotypes and enhance the theoretical clarity of the concept. In doing so, they advocate for re-assessing the intricate interplay of structural, cultural, and multifaceted factors that go beyond the simplistic West–East dichotomy.
In “The Pedagogy of Place in China's Migrant Community,” Min Yu (2024), a Chinese scholar based in the USA, explores the notion of pedagogy of place as articulated by educators working closely with migrant children in the urban communities of Beijing. She does this by situating her empirical findings from Beijing within the East Asian scholarship related to place-based pedagogy and juxtaposing them against international (Anglo-American) literature on the critical pedagogy of place. Hence, her strategy is not to subsume her findings within international scholarship but to deploy an East–West juxtaposition to sensitize herself to something distinctive about the place-based pedagogy emerging from her research in Beijing. She begins this investigation with a survey of the existing literature, wherein a different emphasis on the articulation of place-based pedagogy in Western and East Asian scholarship is identified. According to Min, place-based pedagogy, as discussed by Western researchers and educators, tends to stress critical analyses of the sociopolitical dimension of the place and power dynamics within. In contrast, Eastern scholars and educators in China, Korea, and Japan tend to foreground teaching traditional values and practices of locality, including local landmarks, festivals, and other cultural events, in their place-based curriculum. The lack of explicit focus on power and uneven relations in East Asian scholarship can be construed as a “deficit” typically associated with the harmony-based Eastern approach (see Lisa's contribution). However, Min suspends her judgment here to explore the possibility of a distinct conceptualization of pedagogy of place as practiced by Beijing educators working closely with internal migrant children. In brief, Min's research simultaneously pursues two goals: (1) to provide a rich, contextualized description of the exemplary practice of pedagogy of place as witnessed in the Beijing migrant communities and (2) to capture the practice of place-based pedagogy that is reflective of the specific circumstances of migrant children, in particular their multiple senses of belonging that disrupt the binary between urban and rural.
A similar strategy of East–West juxtaposition and judgment suspension is deployed by Lisa Yiu (2024) in the next article titled “A Harmony-Based Approach to Student Diversity.” Lisa draws on her ethnographic research at a secondary school in Chinese Taiwan to explore a different notion of multicultural education informed by the specific cultural and institutional contexts of Chinese Taiwan and, by extension, East Asia. Her inquiry was motivated by concerns regarding what she considered an uncritical application of the U.S.-based model of multicultural education (culturally relevant pedagogy) in the context of East Asian education. She argues that this practice, or what Chen (2010) would call “West as method,” has resulted in a deficit view of the East Asian cultural, historical, and institutional context as an “obstacle” to the full implementation of multicultural education practice. Instead, she proposes that we look at the specific East Asian context as “assets for … re-imagining multicultural education from an East Asian perspective.” Drawing on her ethnographic work in a school praised for its multicultural initiatives, she puts forward the notion of a harmony-based approach to multicultural education, which is informed by the Confucian emphasis on fairness, interpersonal relations, and whole-person development. Lisa's work particularizes and peculiarizes the dominant international discourse on multicultural education by exposing its implicit prioritization of equity, individuality, and independence. Her use of Confucian thought as a broader sociocultural theory in East Asia can pave the way for a more regionally based approach to teaching diversity in schools.
The next article by Yoonmi Lee (2024), “‘We’ll Be Farmers When We Grow Up’: Education for Humanization and the Legacy of Critical Literacy Education in Korea,” introduces us to the educational thoughts and practices of a legendary educator, Yi O-Deok, in Korea, whose critical literacy work for rural children was renowned in the 1980s and 1990s. While both Yiyang's and Yoonmi's papers focus on one of the nationally recognized Educators within the respective national context of East Asia, Yoonmi departs from Yiyang's cultural focus and instead situates Yi O-Deok's work within the broader historical context of Korea's modernization and rapid urban development as well as the countercultural discourse of “humanization” through education, which gained traction in the 1980s and 1990s. More specifically, Yoonmi illuminates the intricate nuances of the “humanization” catchphrase in education as articulated through Yi O-Deok's writings. Since the devastation of the Korean War (1950–1953), aspirations for material prosperity, economic growth, and instrumental rationality have driven the country's modernization. Within this historical context, Yi O-Deok anchored his work in the indigenous and unadulterated “language of the soil.” Whereas modern European perspectives on human development prioritize enlightenment and rationality, this “indigenous” approach to literacy teaching, adopted by Yi O-Deok and other Korean critical literary educators at the time, embraces inherent contradictions and raw truths in students’ writings not as imperfections but, rather, as virtues to be upheld and celebrated. Yoonmi maintains that by recognizing localized yet universally resonant experiences and ideas, Yi's approach to literacy teaching has the potential to diversify and enrich modern educational discourse. In conclusion, Yoonmi calls for valuing knowledge generated outside typical Western-centric frameworks to promote a more balanced global intellectual dialogue in education.
Similar to all the papers introduced thus far, the next two address the set of dualities between traditional/indigenous and modern, particular and universal, East and West, and local/national and international/global. What sets these two papers apart from the others, however, is their focus on being truthful about the processes whereby the authors attempt to work through the tensions and contradictions associated with these dualities. More specifically, they both document their own complex processes of self-transformation, wherein their past scholarly training and research practices are interrogated and their inherent epistemic affordances and limitations are brought to the surface. Documenting the processes, hence, turned out to be highly personal and emotionally charged, warranting their decision to employ self-reflective writing, a form arguably most suitable for such an intellectual endeavor.
In “A Thrice-Told Tale of Japanese Staffrooms and a Transformative Journey in Searching for East Asia as a Method,” Yanping Fang and Linfeng Wang (2024), two Chinese scholars based in Singapore and Osaka, Japan, document the transformative journey that they underwent while being part of the special-issue group. Using the ethnographic description of a Japanese school staffroom provided by Linfeng as a point of departure, these scholars attempt to generate different layers of meaning from the same empirical object, the Japanese staffroom. They pursue this line of inquiry by applying a range of conceptual frameworks to their analysis of the Japanese staffroom, starting with those that Yanping learned through her graduate training in the USA (social cultural theory and cultural-historic activity theory) and then frameworks informed by East Asian thoughts, which were recently introduced to them during the workshops (Hamaguchi et al.'s [1985] theory of contextualism and Thomas Kasulis’s [2002] theory of intimacy). They contextualize how they came across each of the theoretical frameworks so that readers can appreciate the journey and the associated transformation that these authors underwent. Their exploration concludes with a discussion of the Confucian thoughts and their implications for educational research in East Asia. Demonstrated vividly throughout their writing is the meandering process whereby these researchers learned to come to terms with the aforementioned dualities and then embrace their subjectivity as East Asian education researchers. Their writing suggests, along with many other similar writings in this genre (see Zhang et al. [2015] and the Special Issue edited by Kester [2023]), that it is only by going through such a disruptive—and hence deeply affective—process that one learns to free oneself from the ongoing infatuation with Western theory and explore different theoretical tools that are genuinely useful, irrespective of their “origins.”
The tensions between the indigenous and global-cum-universal as well as the process of self-transformation are also the focus of the next paper by Duck-Joo Kwak (2024), “Doing Educational Research by Taking Seriously Chen's Account of ‘Asia as Method’: In a Korean Case of Modern Schooling.” Duck-Joo invites us to join in her self-exploration of her own subjectivity as a U.S.-trained philosopher of education with the lived experience of growing up and teaching in Korea. Central to her exploration are the two methodological moves that Duck-Joo identifies in Chen's Asia as Method, cultural decolonization and cultural deimperialization. In Duck-Joo's phrases, these two moves are united in their call for both a reflexive form of loyalty and criticality toward one's own indigenous culture and the Western imperial culture. It is this simultaneous strategy of relativizing both the West and the East that she put into practice through the two subsequent vignettes shared in the article. The first vignette concerns her childhood schooling experience of internal conflict in Korea, which serves as a context for her enactment of a reflexive form of cultural decolonization. Here, she focuses on the parallel world she resided in as a child: the world outside school dictated by the Confucian ethos on one hand and the world of school textbooks dictated by modern rationality on the other. She shows that through a series of reflections, she learned to critique Confucian ethos not from the Western rationalistic perspective but from the internal logic of Confucian thought itself. In the second vignette, she uses a critical incident in her university teaching to interrogate her internalization of Western pedagogic assumptions, or to practice the act of de-imperialization. Drawing on these emplaced experiences in Korea, Duck-Joo exemplifies how to practice Asia as Method as an effective strategy for self-articulation, that is, understanding ourselves in the broader historical and cultural horizon of our time.
Post-workshop: Unresolved tensions and further reflections
In a workshop in May 2022, when our full drafts were shared and commented on, Yoonmi took it upon her task to present her concerns about what she felt was apolitical treatment of Confucian thought in many of the manuscripts presented in the workshops. Yoonmi pointed out that there can be two different readings of Confucian thought—political and philosophical—arguing that a purely philosophical reading of his thought can be politically naïve, as they can be easily appropriated to reinforce the hierarchical relations of gender and age as well as authoritative state rules. The Confucian emphasis on the harmony of all beings, when deployed uncritically, can mask and even mystify the existing uneven relations in East Asian schools and communities. At the same time, one can argue that it is this politicized, largely liberal reading of Confucianism that has prevented East Asian traditional thought from becoming a viable resource for the contemporary theorization of education within and beyond East Asia (Takayama, 2022). Yoonmi's interjection provided a moment of fruitful dissensus in the group and we struggled to find a solution to this dilemma foregrounded by her interjection.
The point raised by Yoonmi strikes the heart of the contradiction inherent in our collective project, which was hinted at earlier in this introduction. Doing Asia as Method encourages us to identify regionally shared practices, theories, thoughts, cultures, and institutions to demarcate a point of distinction from the universalistic premises of the West. The potential risk of this project is that it treats Asia as an ontological substance or fixity, as opposed to an “imaginary anchoring point” from which something different can be launched (Chen, 2010, p. 212). Hence, Asia as Method not only necessitates a conscious, imaginative act of positioning ourselves as an epistemological subject. It also involves a highly reflexive fabrication of our own “particularities,” which then can be deployed to contest, de-construct, and re-construct the alleged universalism of the West. Seen from this perspective, our collective work can be conceived of as a process of imagining and reimagining ourselves as East Asians. And this imaginary work comes with a keen awareness that it is a process that must remain incomplete and undermined as any desire to fix “the anchoring point,” with a delineation of what essentially constitutes Asia and Asians, can stall the act of imagining as a practice.
Revisiting Yoonmi's concerns regarding Confucianism, we are once again reminded of the complexities of deploying Confucianism—arguably the quintessentially East Asian body of thought—as part of Doing Asia as Method. As has been extensively debated over the revival of Confucianism (see Billicud & Thoraval, 2008), it assumes ambivalent and complicated roles in East Asian societies as an official state ideology as well as a philosophy with conservative, benign, or even progressive cosmopolitan values and effects. Hence, those of us who attempt to deploy Confucianism must constantly ask whether its political and philosophical “intents” can be separated out or inherently intertwined and under what circumstances it is called upon, toward what ends, and by whom (see Takayama [2023] for a similar discussion on Shinto in Japan). In this sense, critical dialogue and multi-referencing are crucial in our imaginary construction of shared East Asian-ness based on Confucius heritage culture and its subsequent deconstruction, as these strategies invite much-needed viewpoints from elsewhere to assist in its continual renewal.
Another unresolved tension that we felt we did not sufficiently address is that regarding the historically constituted, uneven relationship within East Asia and how it might have been embodied in our interactions as a group. Needless to say, Asia is home to past and present forms of imperialism, including Sinocentrism and Japanese Asianism (Lee, 2019; Takayama, 2016). Historically, the call for Asian regionalism has been driven by the geopolitical interests of the dominating countries, as testified by Japanese imperialism during the Second World War. The problem of the so-called History Wars—though by no means unique to the region—is a continuing legacy of the past imperial violence in the region. Memories of past aggression and suffering, coupled with a lack of material and symbolic retribution, have long hampered the promise of genuine dialogue in the region. This has paved the way for the U.S. to exercise regional geopolitical leadership, constantly mediating inter-Asian relationships (Chen, 2010). Considering these inter-regional tensions, those who pursue Doing Asia as Method must remain vigilant of any potential violence generated by our imaginary attempt to construct a shared regional culture, history, and tradition. Vigilance demands that we learn to assume multiple positionalities within the region so that we remain attentive to what is left out of our reimagining of Asia.
This is essentially what Chen (2010) argues for when discussing international localism or critical syncretism. Through critical syncretism, Chen (2010) demands that the direction of identification be placed “outward,” implying that one should “become others.” It involves seeking an alternative understanding of subjectivity by engaging in multi-layered practices to generate a system of “multiple reference points” that could change the trajectories and flows of desire (Chen, 2010, p. 101). What is meant here is that “Asia” does not function as a method unless those who are Doing Asia as Method continue to undergo the process of being de-constructed and re-constructed, as multiple histories constitute Asia (Lee, 2019). The point raised here about self-deconstruction and self-reconstruction relates back to the notion of “intimacy,” as discussed earlier, for which we must learn to let go of our secured sense of self to participate in a mutually incorporating/incorporated “internal” relationship. Extending Chen's discussion further, we now consider that Doing Asia as Method demands that we learn to become others not just in terms of how we form inter-Asian subjectivities but also in terms of how we engage with each other in the process of pursuing collective intellectual projects such as this Special Issue.
The final task that we felt was not sufficiently explored in our Special Issue but is critical for Doing Asia as Method is to seek alliances with similar decolonial knowledge projects within and beyond the region. South American decolonial theorists Mignolo and Walsh's notion of relationality in the practices of decoloniality is relevant in this regard, as it reminds us to look at decoloniality across “geopolitical locations and colonial differences,” which is “multiple, contextual, and relational” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, pp. 1–4). By seeking relationality within and beyond the region, we can sharpen our own epistemic and ontological positions while positioning our work in a global “decolonial praxis” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 6). Our collective work as a group focused primarily on working toward a regionally focused intellectual space where our shared sense of being East Asian was imagined and then deployed further toward parochializing the West. As a result, we admit that we were less effective in parochializing Asia as well as exploring the possibilities of developing intellectual alliances with broader decolonial praxis emerging in different parts of the world.
With these unresolved issues in mind, we still hope that our collective project will serve as a resource for others who are interested in pursuing alternative ways of generating academic knowledge in education both in and outside East Asia. In concluding this introduction to the Special Issue, we (Keita and Yoonmi) would like to express our sincere appreciation to all contributors who were willing to participate in our 3-year-long experimentation. For us, Doing Asia as Method has been a wayfaring process, meandering to work out a suitable methodological approach that translates Chen's idea in praxis that is best suited for our collective aspirations and needs. We hope that the entire experience has been as meaningful and transformative for you as it has been for us. We also wish to thank Professor Shuangye Chen and her editorial team at ECNU Review of Education for allowing us to experiment with the Special Issue. Thank you all.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
